Let me just say one thing about Zenosaga.com: It's a good repository of information, but I would never trust their judgement. Like has been pointed out here, it's int's opinion and eighty other people too dumb to form their own. I'm sure ed isn't the only one displeased with int. I would probably be too if I could find his damn review. But yeah, I've definitely been disappointed every time I read any subjective article that's ever been there - I probably will again.

That being said, I generally dislike the Xenosaga series in general because I know it's going to suck tons of money and mental energy that I could better spend somewhere else. Dividing a game into episodes is precocious, too. This is probably my personal feelings about XS1 venting out here, but as beautiful as that game was made, a lot was just fluff and doesn't even merit any further development to begin with. I fail to see how XSII could even be any good to begin with.

Remember the days where a two-disc game meant more than 20 hours of gameplay? And that was two CDs, mind you. This is 2 DVDs? Where's the story? It's really obvious that Monolith hasn't really planned anything out in terms of story, and is just winging it, so to speak, and making up for the utter lack of content on their DVD with bunches of random, useless, extra stuff I don't feel like doing.

As I said earlier, XS is going to be an addictive money-sucker because I will continue getting games to find out what happens next regardless of whether it is a beautiful game or a crappy game. XS1 was damn beautiful, but it was damn lacking too. Looks like from what I've read so far that XS2 continues the trend.

Rest in peace, Xenogears.